Preparing Artwork: Riso Playing Card Exhibition

In the next few weeks, we have planned to do a riso exhibition combining students from graphics and illustration and lecturers, in order to raise funds for the final show. This exhibition will be open to friends and family, and a way to gain confidence in sharing your work and the process of setting up a show in preparation for the bigger exhibition open to the public at the end of the academic year. This exhibition is purely Risograph-printed illustrations in the format of playing cards. I love this theme and think it's a great way to push yourself to think about how illustration can be applied to products. 

It'll be interesting to see how everyone approaches this theme as you could choose the King, Queen, Jack, Ace or Joker in any of the suits. From the allocated Teams channel, it was clear that many people wanted to do the Kings, Queens and Jokers, where I was more interested in the creative freedom of an Ace, as the imagery wasn't as defined and I could play around with landscapes. Before committing to any designs or suits, I found some designs and styles on Pinterest that I loved. As I love the bold use of block colours in old matchbox designs, I wanted to use these as inspiration and not focus on the details too much; thinking about the horizontal symmetry and size, it needed to fit the intended purpose. I also wanted to make something that would appeal to a large audience, as cards are played by families and friends of all ages. 

Pixar Playing Cards, Chris Anderson

Left: Jonathon Burton, Right: Tang Yau Hoong

Neiman Marcus

Assorted card designs, sourced on Pinterest

Matchbox designs, found and collated by Jane McDevitt

I found all of these designs via Pinterest, the first being Chris Sanderson's Pixar inspired cards created in 2012. The designs are beautifully minimal and show each character simplified, using red, blue and the off white page as highlights. This is an approach I enjoy using as it has the most impact, and for the smaller playing card size, it makes the imagery readable from a distance. Other designs from Tang Yau Hoong in the series 'Six Degrees Could Change the World' show how minimal design can be the most effective, playing with the spade and diamond shapes to create the landscape and animals.

Einar Herman and Neiman Marcus were two designers who used King and Queen iconography in an abstract way, with block colours and distinctive posing to modernise the standard card designs. I looked at this approach for my King of Spades design, thinking of how I can play with the king connotations and simplify the design.

From here, I began sketching out ideas and finding ways to tie the card designs in with my Iceland project, giving them a further purpose for display at my final show. After a lot of drawings and playing around with flipped designs, I decided to start with a blue and red King card then any other designs would be a bonus.

Concept sketches

Sketches in Fresco, playing around with ways to flip the imagery as a reflection

I love how this design turned out, I set the halftone to 3 giving a nice texture to break up the block colours. I feel this works effectively as a card design and could be made into a whole set with a similar approach for the other characters. Another card I wanted to do was based on a smaller design I did a few months ago with a car travelling through a city at night. I loved this composition and it had the potential to be used in this format so I remade it with some phrases and additional features like the traffic cones and diamond icons.

I look forward to the exhibition in the coming weeks to see everyone's designs and take part to show my work to new people.

The separate red and blue layers set up for the Risograph printing process

New design against the simpler image from a previous project

Final risoprint

Cree, K., 2012. FPO: Pixar Playing Cards. [online] Underconsideration.com. Available at: <https://www.underconsideration.com/fpo/archives/2012/03/pixar-playing-cards.php> [Accessed 8 March 2022].

Yau Hoong, T., 2020. Six Degrees Could Change The World. [online] Flickr. Available at: <https://www.flickr.com/photos/tangyauhoong/5739037367/in/set-72157626756036772/> [Accessed 8 March 2022].

Playingcardstop1000.com. 2022. Playing Cards Top 1000 – Cards have some advice for me… What is it?. [online] Available at: <https://playingcardstop1000.com/> [Accessed 8 March 2022].

Playingcardstop1000.com. 2019. #PlayingCardsTop1000 – Queen of clubs Neiman Marcus deck – Playing Cards Top 1000. [online] Available at: <https://playingcardstop1000.com/playingcardstop1000-queen-of-clubs-neiman-marcus-deck/> [Accessed 8 March 2022].

Folio illustration agency. 2022. Bodil Jane | Character Illustration | Folio illustration agency. [online] Available at: <https://folioart.co.uk/illustrator/bodil-jane> [Accessed 8 March 2022].

Flickr. 2022. Jane McDevitt. [online] Available at: <https://www.flickr.com/photos/maraid/> [Accessed 8 March 2022].

Pinterest. 2022. 160 Illustration Year 3 ideas in 2022 | illustration, matchbook art, playing cards design. [online] Available at: <https://www.pinterest.co.uk/ameliabrookep/illustration-year-3/> [Accessed 7 March 2022].